Each developer that participated in IGN's The Future of PSP feature was asked a series of questions about their work with PlayStation Portable, both past and present. To give context to the entire opinion set, we asked each team a set of six common questions about the PSP:
- What have you learned from PSP?
- How do you approach PSP development?
- How tough are the budgets on PSP games?
- What can Sony could do for developers?
- What features of PSP need to be pushed?
- What is the future of PSP?
Not all of the developers and producers we talked to were able to take part in the feature (between difficult development schedules, tricky license issues and other reasons, a few of your favorite PSP developers may not have answers for you yet on their views of the PSP's future.) However, we do want to extend our appreciation to every single person that participated or talked with us about this feature. We would also like to thank the teams for their candor and insight -- we at IGN learned a heck of a lot about the PSP from talking with the teams powering it, and we're sure you'll learn a lot from reading through what they all had to say.
What is the future of PlayStation Portable? You're about to find out...
Location: Emeryville, California (also has studios in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island) Formed: 1992 PSP Works: Death Jr., Death Jr. 2: Root of Evil, Sonic Rivals, NBA Ballers: Rebound, Sega Genesis Collection, Brooktown: Senior Year Other Works: Dozens of SKUs for all known platforms, recently Mech Assault: Phantom War for DS. Also created the Death Jr. comic book. History: Backbone Entertainment may sound like a new company, but the home of DJ was once known as Digital Eclipse (and still operates under that name for its many, many classic console emulation projects.) Backbone is a founding studio of Foundation 9, a collective of some of the biggest developers working in games today. Fun Fact: Select members of Backbone Entertainment know who the IGN Pokemon of the Day Guy was! Look For This Logo: |
Mike Mika is the studio head of Backbone Entertainment Emeryville. The company has a special relationship with the PlayStation Portable -- Sony Computer Entertainment selected Backbone's Death Jr. as the first game ever seen on PSP, and around the same time of the announcement and launch of PSP, Backbone Entertainment began to form from the roots of its Digital Eclipse operations the Foundation 9 group, becoming the largest independent developer in North America (including The Collective, Shiny, Amaze, Pipeworks, Digital Eclipse and more). Backbone Entertainment develops titles for a variety of console and handheld game systems.
QUESTIONS FOR BACKBONE ENTERTAINMENT
:: You built the whole Death Jr. franchise around that first PSP game. The character has became the first mascot and multimedia icon to come from the PSP world. What was it about the system that encouraged Backbone to put such faith in it? Do you see DJ sticking with handheld platforms and being a portable gaming star or do you want to still take DJ to consoles?
I was in a meeting at E3 when I got a text message on my cell phone from someone who will go nameless that they just heard the specs for the PSP. I received several text messages with detailed specs, one message leading into the other. The fact that I can't remember what meeting I was in tells you how excited I was. At that moment in time, we had just built out our first 3D game demo, before that, we were a hardcore Game Boy studio. Call it serendipity, but our efforts to go into 3D coupled with our handheld experience - well, the opportunity presented itself as a win-win. The demo we were toting around had a little character in it that we had come to like internally, Death, Jr. In our heart of hearts, we wanted to make that game, but our Plan B was to at least secure a licensed 3D console project. With demo in hand, we approached Sony right away and they, too, understood the opportunity and were kind enough to get us involved with the PSP very early. We love handheld, but Death, Jr. isn't something we saw as a long-term handheld game. In fact, we get a lot of fan mail asking when we will bring Death, Jr. to console. I think it's time he makes the jump.
:: Backbone's programmers developed a special system of H.D.R. Lighting in Death Jr. 2. When you first hear that, you'd have a hard time believing it -- "Look, it's the same lighting system that's in Half-Life 2" -- and might think that it was a technique done more for the novelty factor than the in-game benefit. But in action, this technique really makes a difference on PSP, and a subtle one at that -- it may not stick out the way you'd think, but it blends the game's graphics and tones, making the game pop in every situation. Is this effect something other developers should be looking into utilizing (or maybe licensing?), or was this a feature made out of necessity for Death Jr.? Will we see it again before the next DJ?
This was something driven from our engineering group. It really is like Christmas in our offices everyday. I remember coming into the office and someone saying,"You need to see this." The demo was running on PSP hardware showing off the kind of lighting effects you only see on console. Why was this such a big deal? On PSP, a lot of games look drab or dull, with a sort of muted palette. More than simulating the kind of effects you see in Half-Life was the effect it had on the range from dark to light for a game like Death, Jr. It made the game just look better in almost every circumstance. Harsh lighting, colored shadows. When an engineer shows your art team something like HDR, they devour it. It was a tricky implementation, but at the end of the day, it paid off in spades. It's a derivative implementation but yields almost the same result as you'd expect on console. It's very cool, and I think other games could be improved with it.
:: For your latest game Brooktown High, Backbone has decided to do a love sim -- something that not only has not been done on PSP but that also has you yet been seen much at all in American videogames. Why did you want to make Brooktown High, and what made you decide to do it on PSP?
Konami presented the opportunity to us. We're always looking for something that challenges us, and making a dating sim for the US is as challenging as it gets. We sat down with Tokimeki Memorial and played through it together - it's a fun game to play as a group, and we had a blast. It is very Japanese, but when you strip away the surface of the game, it's basically a resource manager, or a game similar to those classic empire building games. It was very cool. But how to bring that to the US? That is the big question. Writing is very important and cannot be understated. It was the most challenging aspect of the game, and went though a lot of revisions. A game like Brooktown needs to satisfy a pretty diverse audience. We think we did a fantastic job with it, but this kind of game really needs to just get out there and generate feedback. We didn't have a bar to measure against - It's not the Sims, it's not Sprung. By the time we reached Alpha with the game, Bully came out. It's a very different game, but also shares a lot of similarities. Whereas Bully is linear, we're completely sandbox, but both deal with the complexities of High School in a tongue in cheek way. If we played our cards right, Brooktown is the kind of game that develops into an addiction. I'm going back to the game to manage my relationships continually. You can pick it up and play a few weeks of school in a small amount of time. It makes a great portable experience as a result.
:: Your company has always been the go-to team for development of professional emulation tools of classic gaming -- Backbone has credits on the Activision Anthology and Capcom Classics series for PSP and has also done a number of Xbox 360 and now PS3 conversions. These classic games are now being aimed for the downloadable game market. Would you like to see PSP get into this side of the business? Do you have any kind of estimate of how powerful PSP would be in playing classic games if Sony brought its PlayStation Network service to the portable?
Let's face it, PSP's screen resolution is the perfect destination for classic games. They just look gorgeous on it. We've discovered so many ways to make that screen and the games we emulate for it sing. One of our finest moments was the Sega Collection for PSP. Though most will never notice, we tackled the challenge of screen latency. A lot of classic games are set in space with bullets that are only a few pixels tall. On the PSP those bullets get lost due the screen latency. I challenge anyone to notice it on the Sega Collection. That was yet another engineering feat that I just walked into one day. As for horsepower, well, the PSP is probably the perfect handheld for emulation. To emulate the Sega Genesis at 60mhz, on a 220mhz processor, really tells you that the PSP has a unique architecture well suited for emulation and classic games. Classic games are also very small by today's standards, as far as memory footprint. You can fit a lot of classic on a memory stick. So downloading classic games through a PSN-like service on PSP is a no-brainer.
:: Backbone and its Digital Eclipse staff have been around for a long, long time now and have developed on just about every modern system along the way. How does PSP compare to other systems the team has worked with?
It's very unique. It has a lot of goodies, like Ad Hoc and On-Line play. The screen still amazes me. It's hard to compare it to something like a DS. I think Nintendo and Sony have built an unusual co-existence together. It's hard to compare the two systems, since they deliver very different experiences, and are each very successful. Where other systems have died trying, the PSP carved out a piece of the handheld pie.
GENERAL PSP QUESTIONS
:: You have worked on a number of games for the PSP, what have you learned about making PSP and handheld games in that process?
As hardware gets more advanced, the expense begins to skyrocket. But the notion of a handheld game as a cheaper production still exists. So you have to find very creative ways to manage the production of a PSP game and try to deliver a console-like experience for only a small percentage of the price of a console game. It's hard to create a game and send it out into the world when you know that "if only we had three more months." On handheld platforms, the luxury of a long schedule is very rare. The people it takes to produce games under these conditions are exceptionally talented.
:: Explain how your team approaches PSP development? Do you view the system as a portable that needs portable-oriented games, or do you have a less specific view of it as just one of the many systems to bring your creation to?
Our team members work on a variety of platforms. From a technical perspective, PSP is just a 3D platform, the same as PS2, Wii or anything else. It has specs and limitations, but what we do when programming for PSP is no different than any other 3D system. Our engineers aren't PSP specific, they are either 3D engineers or 2D engineers. Many have moved smoothly from PSP to other 3D platforms and back. However, when it comes to PSP development, on the design side, we do have to take into consideration where our audience will be when playing a game, how much time they have to play it, and what sort of games work best with the control layout. It's very easy to "port" an experience from a console to PSP, it speaks well to the technology, but at the same time, the console experience is had in an entirely different set of conditions than a portable. Why would you play your PSP while sitting in your living room in front of your PS3 and your 42" LCD TV? People buy portables to satisfy their boredom in transit, or any situation where they are away from home. So we really need to focus on things like how often one can save a game, how long a level is, and avoid reliance on audio cues in gameplay. Someone may be playing a game in less than ideal conditions.
:: Is there anything Sony could do as the platform creator and manager that would help you as a PSP developer?
It sure would be nice to see Sony iterate the hardware like Nintendo does. Maybe see a new form factor or some built in features get added to the system. I can dream of an extra analog, but the complexities surrounding support for that on the current hardware, things like how to handle the option to support two analogs or not on the software side, well - that's a bit complicated.
:: Is there a feature of the PlayStation Portable that you would like to see used more often, something you would suggest publishers put more priority on when a PSP project is commenced?
Downloadable extensibility and support for online play. The first feature to get cut due to budget is usually multiplayer on-line. It takes time to get it right, and time is money. I'd like to see more publishers invest in it, since I feel it can improve a game's potential dramatically. The system can do it. There is nothing preventing the PSP from having a Halo-like multiplayer experience other than time and money.
:: What do you see is the future of PlayStation Portable?
If I look into my crystal ball, I see the PSP getting a re-launch, with more productivity software, and a new form factor with built-in peripherals, like the camera, microphone, and maybe even the GPS! How cool would that be? If I look deeper, I see another analog and the world rejoices, but when you get home and open the box, it is more of a placebo than an extra analog, and I realize that it is just an extra speaker on closer inspection. I cry through the pain and load up Brooktown and try to score with Elektra, who I am realizing is a little bit easy and I thought it was just my charm. I'm happy again.
Return for more of
The Future of PlayStation Portable